A Note from Lee, 11 October

11.10.18

For everyone who is camping on these school holidays, I am sorry about the rain, but my garden loves it and all we need is a bit more out in the country and a bit less tonight in Kings Cross…because…it’s OPENING NIGHT of Nick Coyle’s play The Feather in the Web.

The flowers have been arriving all day for the cast, Maddie is heading over to Bourke Street Bakery (thank you for being such great sponsors!), last minute touch-ups are happening in the theatre, the Currency Press copies of the script look awesome (another play to put on the Australian play bookshelf!)…and here we go! Launching another play out into the national imagination. Opening Nights are always great days.

I get a bit nervous, even when I’m not directing. It’s a big event in the life of a playwright, seeing their words meet the audience, hearing the audience respond to their ideas; ideas that have only existed inside their brains until now. Those ideas are standing in front of them and the world as characters in costumes and actions on a set filled with live emotions. There is no such thing as a perfect opening night, it’s the nature of theatre—compromise, chance, adrenaline, ghosts—but it is always exciting. And never more so than when it is a new Australian play. Classics reach back across time to connect us to our ancestors, to remember where we have come from; new plays reach forward in time to talk to our children and our grandchildren about our hopes for our collective future, our dreams, our confessions and our fears.

The first production of a new play is always an experiment. The hope is that the play will go on to have more productions around Australia and around the world in years to come. I hope you come and see this first production of The Feather in the Web, and I hope that if you can’t see it, you will see another production of it in another city, in another year. It is a beautiful story: funny, confronting, heartbreaking and hopeful. It is an adventure play. And it has come from inside the brain of one of our most inventive theatre imagineers (otherwise known as playwrights). It is original. It is fresh. He wrote it for you. We hope you love it.